In recent years, many areas of science and technology have benefited enormously from advances in information technology (IT). For example, the combination of increased processing power and speed, improved communications and advanced data management systems have enabled the life sciences and healthcare industries to solve highly complex problems with far greater ease than was previously possible. The results have included new scientific discoveries, development of new drugs, as well as new treatment methodologies. Combined with recent advances in biology and the convergence between modem biology and healthcare, IT is playing an important role in improving upon the efficacy, reach and methodology of current healthcare practices.
The union of ideas, expertise and disciplines makes some bright promises for the future, but convergence between life sciences and IT has also led to a plethora of challenges and requirements that have not yet been met. Domain experts such as biologists, chemists, doctors and clinicians face the daunting task of consolidating their core expertise with the knowledge of IT advancements at a very low level of abstraction. There are several other important issues such as how to achieve collaboration, integration, automation and resource management across multiple teams spread across different disciplines, departments, organizations and geographies. These challenges currently act as deterrents to the realization of the true potential of the convergence between life sciences and IT.
Similar challenges exist in other areas of science and technology, and other multi-discipline work environments. There is a need for improved collaboration and integration to make better use of the capabilities of recent advances in IT.
Provision of services over a distributed, heterogeneous network has typically relied on IT developers writing appropriate wrappers for existing resources, to enable interoperability, or ensuring that the resources conform to Grid-middleware standards (OGSA). The Grid is an infrastructure that enables the integrated, collaborative use of high-end computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid computing provides an open and standard platform for sharing of resources as Grid services, as described in the OGSI Working Group's specification ‘Open Grid Services Infrastructure Version 1.0’, S. Tuecke, K. Czajkowski, I. Foster, J. Frey, S. Graham, C. Kesselman, T. Maguire, T. Sandholm, P. Vanderbilt, D. Snelling, June 2003. Problems may be solved using resources on the Grid after encoding the problem as Grid jobs submitted via a Grid portal. Dynamic integration of services of distributed resources is described in ‘The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration’ I. Foster, C. Kesselman, J. M. Nick and S. Tuecke, June 2002.